This article was published on January 31, 2010

What Do Bing, Google and Twitter Have in Common?


What Do Bing, Google and Twitter Have in Common?

The fact that all three of them follow Robert Scoble on Twitter, according to Twiangulate — a tool that allows you to find connections between three Twitter users.

twiangulate

On Twiangulate, you can view friends and followers shared by more than one particular user in the form of a table or a map. Through this, you can also discover which friends or followers are more influential, or obscure, by seeing how they are connected to different users. The idea being that if you know who a user with few, but more active followers finds more relevant, that you can weed out the people you may not want to follow yourself.

You can choose to include the people you follow in the results by authenticating your Twitter account. Twiangulate could be your new approach to finding people to follow, simply by seeing three people your friends (or competitors) have in common.

What would be really interesting, is if we could also see a visualization of how these connections evolve over time.

Making connections

Another awesome tool to discover connections is Web Seer, by hint.fm. It’s a collaboration app from visual communications researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg — who have given us some beautiful visualization projects in the past, such as Touch, WordTree and Listen.

What Web Seer does is compare Google Suggest results. It sports a very nice, clean design and apart from great fun, it could be a useful tool for your presentations. The thicknesses of the arrows and words in the visualization show how many pages on the web answer each question.

I thought I’d use it to take a look at the future. According to Google Suggest, Apple and Google will take over the world, while Facebook and Twitter will die!

AppleGoogle

Back off Pinky and the Brain, Apple and Google are taking over!

FacebookTwitter

Guess MySpace will make a comeback.

Just a warning for both tools, you may lose track of time while exploring connections. Why don’t you share the discoveries that made you LOL in the comments below.

Some suggestions: “Star Wars is” Vs “Star Trek is” , “Batman is” Vs “Superman is” and “Steve Jobs is” Vs “Steve Wozniak is”. Enjoy!!!

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